Indie game jam

MonsieurEvil

<div class="IPBDescription">At gamasutra - may require free reg.</div>There is a very interesting article at <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com" target="_blank">Gamasutra.com</a> on how too many games are written around the technology rather than the gameplay. It basically shows a number of games people wrote where the technology was lowered and the focus was on interesting and imaginative gameplay

<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020531/adams_01.htm" target="_blank">main article is here</a>

There is one veeerrrryyyyyy interesting sample though:

<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td><b>Quote</b> </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"><!--QuoteEBegin-->Total Age of Doomcraft & Conquer: Romero Alert, by Robin Walker & Brian Jacobson. A super-RTS, with an innovative gestural command interface and thousands of units. The game is hilariously chaotic to watch. Instead of producing units slowly, one at a time as in ordinary RTS's, the factories spew them forth in a fountain all over the nearby area.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span id='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Gestural interface? RTS? Robin Walker and Brian Jacobson? What the...?!?!

richard_of_richardland

LOL@ "total age of doomcraft & conquer"

Love the name.

Anyway, yeah gameplay is being sacrificed to graphics, more worryingly it seems to be a trend in developers that stems from reviewers and consumers.

Consumers will pay over the odds for a mediocre game if it has the latest graphics, even if it does nothing for the game.

I wouldn't say JK2 was the worst game I've played, but if it weren't for the graphical beauty of the lightsabers and the general niceties of the engine itself then it would be a very ordinary game.
The gameplay isn't very nice imo, and the death animations were attrocious(sp), after shooting a guy he would suddenly fling himself forwards down a huge fall isntead of what would seem natural to just collapse.

The other game I am perhaps more willing to scald is MOHAA. I hated this game, yet I see everywhere it is replacing HL as the "best game ever".

That I find is an insult to good gameplay. The gameplay I found was not only slow, it was easy (even on hard which I played on straight away as a recommendation that it was an easy game), it was desperate for to try and claim realism, but somehow everyone said how realistic it was despite the fact it was one guy (with perhaps a couple of mates) against half the german army.

The realism thing was got around by somehow having loads of health (including 100hp packs every level and loads of smaller packs) and making the enemy reaction time so slow, that you'd think they didn't know what the guns in their hand was for.
You could quite litterally walk in a room, then let them do a little dance before shooting you (which I nicknamed the "Jig o' Death") or let them slowly walk up to you as if to examine your dog-tag.
Troops on "patrol" wouldn't even have their guns up and ready, and look surprised when they stumbled across you.

I was disappointed, for a game that so many had said was so good I was really expecting more from the gameplay, which I found to be trite and repetetive.

Then, as if somehow I don't know what a good game is, people say "well you can't have played the DDay mission".

It's as if that mission brainwashes people into believing one map can make a game.
If the only reason to play the game is one good level, no matter how good that level is, then the gameplay of the game is awful.

Also the whole flashing thing and objective based gameplay for something that was "realism" annoyed me.

I wish games would stop doing that because I find half-life more realistic than MOHAA or RTCW because of the way in those games the player is constantly taken out the game.

Sure, give breifings, but please do it outside the action, in times when the officers would be breifed in RL.
While I'm immersed in the game, I don't want a message popping up telling me that I should plant the bomb on the flashing red jeep or whatever.

Also I found the MOHAA gameplay not too linear as such, but too forced, as in I woudln't have done what was clearly being forced out the player in many situations.
If I cannot get on being the character of the game I am not going to enjoy it, and MOHAA I found that I was being forced out of character.

MonsieurEvil

/me changes your name to 'Rick of LongResponseWorld'.

<!--emo&:p--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':p'><!--endemo-->

J/K, interesting reply.

Flayra

Make no mistake, these aren't serious projects.  These were each created in a weekend.  My friend Brian (Sharp) was involved in this, and it sounds like an absolutely nutty coding paradise.  They basically wrote code as fast as they could for 48 hours straight.  It sounds like utter madness.

Random miscellany:  Brian (Jacobson) used to be a Boston native, until he up and left for Valve.  I used to talk mod stuff with him...like 1.5 years ago?

I'd love to see this spew-licious RTS though.